RetroFed
Open Source vs the Invisible Hand
https://nesbitt.io/2026/06/18/open-source-vs-the-invisible-hand.html
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earthwormopen source has run for thirty years on a basis the textbook says cannot hold. It looks more like several arrangements overlaid on each other, part gift economy, part shared infrastructure, part public archive, part reputation system, with no single mechanism carrying it.
If this kind of shit had been scribbled in the margins of my economics textbook, I would’ve paid more attention in class.
You might dig James Boyle. I haven’t read “The Public Domain” (book by him) yet, but I have read the IP Caselaw textbook he coauthored. It’s really meant to be a textbook for law students, not a treatise on anticapitalism, so it mostly doesn’t go into the kind of stuff in this article, but it does have excerpts from The Public Domain (which is a lot more about the kind of stuff in Nesbitt’s blog post) throughout and the final chapter in particular is very much on that topic.
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It’s odd to use npm packages as an example of anything worthwhile. They’re a mess. For a while, morons were making npm packages containing a single trivial line of code, and there were Node developers stupid enough to use them. Linux, the GNU utilities or even bind would have been less problematic examples.
As for the invisible hand, it was an expression first used by Adam Smith (the real one, not the knobhead crackpot who later assumed his name) to just say “huh, it just kinda seems to pan out somehow.” It has never been rigorously shown to actually work. And all the various known modes of market failure make it probable that there is no self-correction at all.
To me the invisble hand really shows off a really cool phenomon. It is pretty cool that with some agreed apon currencies and a market you really can get a scale of human coopetation not seen before in human history.
Calling it infallible is as stupid of “the divine right of kings” was even if feudalism was almost a remarkable improvement from war bands before (you know long stand multigenerational peace agreements and mechanisms to enforce bilatteral enforment).